The late Francis Crick, one of Britain's most famous scientists, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. He is best known for his discovery, jointly with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, of the double helix structure of DNA, though he also made important contributions in understanding the genetic code and was exploring the basis of consciousness in the years leading up to his death in 2004.
I don’t think things necessarily appeared to me mysterious because in a certain sense to a child everything is commonplace and mysterious and the same time. You know they accept it and yes there's something- it's sort of there and yet it has strange properties you see. I think what appealed to me was- when I read that there were explanations at a different level which would explain some of these properties. I didn’t ask myself, you know, what happens when water melts or something like that but I read what happens when water melts and I thought isn’t that surprising. You can describe it in that particular way-Ice?Yes- I am sorry, when ice melts, I beg your pardon yes. So one- if you- if I read about how ice melts I would then look at the phenomenon in nature and think isn’t it interesting you can explain it in that particular way. But I don’t think I posed the question, what happens when one goes from the other. There were just so many things in the world which did this and did that and it was the realisation that they could be explained in a more uniform and simplifying way that I found very appealing, as I think most people do if they- if it isn’t made difficult for them and if it is something they- certainly it helps if it is something they are puzzled about but, there are after all some very surprising things, I mean who would have thought that light and heat and x-rays and radio waves were simply all electro magnetic radiation of different wave lengths? They all look- have a totally different character but in fact physics tells us that is not true. It is just- just that some of them are very high frequency and some of them are much lower frequency and they all travel at the speed of light, in a vacuum anyway so, again, those are the great- some of the great unifying principals of science which are not the ones that you get from ordinary common sense, shall we say. I mean you can know about radio waves and you can know about light without realising there was any connection between the two.
Title: My earliest interest in science (Part 2)
Listeners:
Christopher Sykes
Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.
In 1993 he and his wife, Lotte, made a series for BBC2 called 'Seven
Wonders of the World', in which outstanding scientists were invited to
talk about themselves and their own seven wonders... Francis Crick
declined to play this particular game (on the basis that 'everything is
wonderful'), but he did agree to spend a couple of hours talking about
his life and and work. The footage did not appear in the 'Seven
Wonders' series, and has never been publicly shown. When Crick died in the summer of 2004, BBC TV kindly gave permission for it to be included in 'Peoples Archive'.
Technical note: the videotapes from which the Peoples Archive streaming version has been prepared had timecode-in-vision in the lower third of the picture. We have reframed the material to exclude this timecode because it is distracting, although this does mean that the image is sometimes a more extreme close-up than either director or cameraman ever intended!
Duration:
2 minutes, 17 seconds
Date story recorded/uploaded:
1993
Date story went live:
24 January 2008
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